Gamma

I care mostly about shell scripting, so I’m focusing on those bits. Via the HackerNews thread, mostly from a-french-anon:

• readlink and realpath
• find -print0, xargs -0 and read -d
• find -iname
• sed -E
• set -o pipefail
• $' ' strings

in the OP

My reply is to a commenter who said they prefer "${HOME}/docs" over both options in the original image ("$HOME/docs" or "$HOME"/docs). Many people prefer to always include braces around the parameter name out of consistency, instead of only when they are required.

My comment explained why my habit is to only include braces when they are necessary.

It’s interesting, the results here are way different than the Code Golf & Coding Challenges Stack Exchange. I would never expect Haskell to be that low. But after looking at code.golf, I realize it’s because I/O on CG&CC is more relaxed. Most Haskell submissions are functions which return the solution.

Sidenote: I like the CG&CC method, it’s semi-competitive, semi-cooperative.

• all languages welcome
• almost all users post “Try it Online”/“Attempt This Online” links
• most users post explanations under their submissions
• often people will post solutions beginning with “port of user1234’s excellent Foolang answer” when there’s a clever shortcut someone finds
• or people will post their own solution with “here’s a solution which doesn’t use user1234’s algorithm”
• or people will add comments to answers with minor improvements

IMO It’s geared towards what is the best part about code golf: teaching people about algorithm design and language design.

This has never stuck with me, and I hadn’t thought about why until now. I have two reasons why I will always write ${x}_$y.z instead of ${x}_${y}.z:

• Syntax highlighting and shellcheck have always caught the cases I need to add braces to prevent $x_ being expanded as ${x_}.
• I write a lot of Zsh. In Zsh, braces are optional in way more cases. "$#array[3]" actually prints the length of the third item in array, rather than (Bash:) the number of positional parameters, then the string 'array[3]'.

This isn’t true. Shellcheck doesn’t insist on braces unless it thinks you need them.

Typically find "$HOME/docs", but with a few caveats:

• In Zsh or Fish, the quotes are unnecessary: find $HOME/docs

• If I’m using anything potentially destructive: mv "${HOME:?}/bin" ...

• Of course, if it’s followed by a valid identifier character, I’ll add braces: "${basename}_$num.txt"

I was going to say “At least I can click ‘Continue reading’ and it actually goes away immediately” but actually, no. This is still enshittification, I’ve just gotten used to shittier versions of it.

Fwiw, gitea has compatible actions. Not sure how compatible, though.

Stole Forked this idea from Drew Devault.

I’m looking at NixOS now for my server, and while I understand the host config, I’m curious whether I could integrate this into my config in some way.

I’ve done symlinks into a separate directory before, but by far my favorite method is to just let ~ be a git repo. It’s maximally simple, no other tooling needed besides git.

There are a few key steps to making this work well:

• echo '*' > ~/.gitignore: This way git status isn’t full of untracked files. I can still git add -f what I actually want to track.
• git branch -m dots: For clarity in my shell prompt.
• [ -d "$HOME/.local/$(hostname)/bin" ] && PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/$(hostname)/bin and similar if there’s config I want to apply only to certain hosts.